Deseret News Archives, http://www.deseretnews.com
Fear lingers for children of divorce By Susan Whitney
Deseret News special writer © 1999 Deseret News Publishing
Co.
Saturday, November 20, 1999
Loneliness.
Twenty-five years after their parents' divorce, this is what people
remember from their childhoods: loneliness and fear. Well, terror,
actually, says Judith Wallerstein. Wallerstein is a psychologist
and one of the nation's premier divorce researchers. She says adults like
to believe that children are aware of their parents' unhappiness, expect
the divorce and are relieved when it happens. But that's a myth, she
says. What children actually conclude is: If one parent can leave
another then they both could leave me. As a society we like to think
that divorce is a transient grief, a minor upheaval in a child's life.
Myth, again, she says. Divorcing parents go through transition. Their
children live in transition. Wallerstein does long-term
studies. She's followed a group of California families since the early
1970s, interviewing fathers, mothers and children at regular intervals,
beginning with the divorce. The results of the 10-year follow-up became a
best-selling book called "Second Chances." This week, Wallerstein came
to Utah. She talked about her soon-to-be-released 25-year
follow-up. She quoted men and women who are turning 30, people who were 21/2
to 6 years old when their parents divorced. These little people -- whom
the judges and mediators and lawyers never met, who never got therapy --
were more vulnerable than their parents or older siblings "with a far
greater need for family structure, far less able to comfort themselves or
seek help elsewhere." They were children of the
middle class, but they remember being worried about who would feed
them. They remember being afraid that when they woke up in the morning,
no one would be there. One week their moms were home, at least part-time.
The next week, their moms were at work and they were left in the care of
strangers or of older siblings -- who, being angry and grieving and
children themselves, did not hesitate to hit. "Their loneliness was
overwhelming," Wallerstein said. "Such are the core memories of these
children . . . an abrupt and sudden diminution of nurturing." A
28-year-old woman says her father's departure was a complete surprise. "I
don't remember anybody explaining anything to me," she told Wallerstein,
looking back from the perspective of an adult. "I spent so much time
alone. I tried to become my own support, but I was only 4. I went for days
without saying a word." Wallerstein warns: Even tiny
children who witness violence are affected by it. Even one incident of
domestic violence stays in their minds forever. "We'd better take this
seriously," she says. Those children need counseling. And more warnings:
Children of divorce hit adolescence with low expectations and big
emotional hungers. One-half the children she studied used drugs during
their teens. Middle-class married parents
send their children to college. In Wallerstein's study only one-third of
divorced parents could be counted on for tuition. Repeatedly, wealthy
fathers told her, "I paid my child support for 18 years. Now I am done."
It made no difference that they'd regularly seen their children. Divorce
cuts family relationships loose from their moorings, Wallerstein says. As
a society we try to look past those severed ties. Nor can court orders
mandate relationships. In general, Wallerstein finds
that 21-year-old children of divorce are angry with their parents. They
are usually more angry at their fathers.